by Mike Doughty
There was a sampler player who had done both the all-sampler and all-vocalist Cobras—he was brought on to the latter along with some other nonvocalists because he knew the piece. He was less intimidating than the other sampler players; they tended to be mavericks, but this guy was timid and high-strung. He was constantly wide-eyed, like the proverbial animal in headlights. He said yes, too.
Rehearsal studios in New York went by the hour. It was something like $12 per; insanely expensive for me. It was my gig, so the assumption was that I was hiring them, that it was my deal. They were, in fact, so busy that this was the single rehearsal I could grab them for.
Half an hour late, the bass player and the drummer arrived with bagels and coffee. I stood there with my guitar plugged in, gawking at them, as they joked and ate their breakfasts.
Can we play? My money’s running out, I said.
They laughed at me. A half hour later, they had finished their bagels.
“Yo, G,” said the drummer, who spoke a thickly Hebrew accented, broken Brooklynish, “it is time to pump. It is time that we must pump now.”
I was floored from the jump. I had tried to explain to other rhythm sections how to do the grooves I wanted. With these two, it was just there. That huge sound.
I started one tune by explaining I wanted the rhythm to be something like James Brown’s “Funky Drummer.”
“Yo, G,” said the drummer, “nobody want to play that there beat. Everybody done that beat already.”
We blasted through a bunch of songs in an hour. I was half elated, half panicked. Suddenly the sampler player walked in.
Where’s your sampler? I said.
“I brought this,” he said. He held up a video camera. “I’m going to record audio and practice to it later.”
To promote a gig, I’d call 200 people; basically, everybody I’d ever met in New York. I sat down at 3 PM, with a notebook with names and numbers anarchically scribbled in it, and made calls until 11. Every third person asked to be on the guest list.
Seventeen people came. One rehearsal wasn’t enough to really know the tunes, so transitions were sketchy, but I was dumbstruck. The bass player and the drummer seemed not to give a fuck that I was standing there, but they filled the room with an extraordinary rumble.
The sampler player didn’t start playing until about the last verse of each tune; it took him that long to load his hard drive. He clearly hadn’t listened to his videotape, but I loved his sounds. Peals from space and spectral voices.
There wasn’t much, but I divided the money four ways.
“Yo, G,” said the drummer. “This is not right. This isn’t enough. You pay for my cab. That’s how it’s done, G.”
After paying for cabs, I had lost the precious (for me) sum of $25. But I was sold: if I could hold on to them, this was my band.
They showed up for the gigs I booked, usually looking sort of bored, sometimes en route to other, more profitable gigs later in the evening. Their lethargy was a little contagious. For one gig, I didn’t call those 200 people beforehand to hawk the show. Too exhausted. Fuck it, if seventeen people was the norm, what difference would it make if it was ten?
Fifty-five people showed up anyway. Fifty-five people. Something was actually happening.
“There’s two ways to play the sampler,” the sampler player said, “as a conventional keyboard, or to trigger sound effects.” I hoped I could convince him otherwise.
I brought some CDs over to his house. There were a bunch of sounds I wanted him to use: Howlin’ Wolf, the Andrews Sisters, Toots and the Maytals, The Roches, Raymond Scott, Grand Puba, a cast recording of Guys and Dolls.
His house was so organized, it made me feel weird. He had a master’s degree in composition from an uptown conservatory and was well inculcated in the conservatory mind-set—he called rock drummers “percussionists” and used terms like sforzando when discussing how best to approach a rhythm that I’d ripped off from Funkdoobiest. There was an oddness to his look; it was as if he only wore those clothes that middle-class moms buy at department stores and lay on the childhood bed when their kid comes home for Christmas. Which, it turned out, was exactly the case.
He was a protégé of Anthony Coleman, who brought him into the messier world of the Knit and at whose goading he switched from writing jokey orchestral pieces with scatological titles to electronic-collage pieces, stitched from recordings of his own music school recitals.
The sampler player got me high. Despite his square look and academic pedigree, he was a gluttonous stoner. He had a job editing radio commercials in a windowless studio; he stayed up all night mousing and clicking at a monitor, getting high (next to the computer was a briefcase-sized hard drive with an utterly impressive four gigabyte capacity), alone but for his boss’s yellow canary. The weed made the sampler player so jumpy that sometimes he seemed deranged.
He played me a thing that he’d done with a few horn notes from a recording of his chamber-music pieces. He played slowed-down and sped-up versions of it simultaneously. It was aching, and cyclical, and it was gorgeous. I recited a poem over it, and it became the Soul Coughing song “Screenwriter’s Blues.”
The repetitions of dance music were foreign to him. “You mean, you want me to play this over and over again?” he asked in rehearsal.
“Yo, G,” said the drummer, “just hold down that there key with some duct tape.”
He was too proud for the duct-tape maneuver, but he became OK with the repetition. He bought a copy of Parliament’s Chocolate City and practiced to it. He learned how to load his hard drive faster. He idolized the bass player, who had wizardly ears—he could hear what you were going to play before you played it, and could complement or contradict your part with a bass line, concocted on the spot, of great force and ingenious simplicity.
After a rehearsal, we ate at a diner. The waitress took the plates away, and the check was passed around. I got some change and put down $12. The sampler player got out his wallet, pulled out $10, put it on the table. The drummer got out his wallet, took out $20, put it on the table, took the $10 back.
Then the check got to the bass player. He held the check in his hand, and took out his wallet. Opened his wallet. Then he put the check down and put his wallet back.
The guy had just mimed paying the check.
When the sampler player counted up the money, we were short exactly what the bass player owed. The check was passed around again. The drummer put in a couple extra bucks. He gave it to the bass player. The bass player rubbed his chin, acting stumped by the discrepancy.
The sampler player saw it, too. We didn’t confront him. The sampler player was too in awe of the guy; I couldn’t believe somebody would actually do that.
At that moment, the bass player was thirty-four years old. I didn’t occur to me until I was myself thirty-four that this kind of trickery wasn’t something most adults did.
I was twenty-three, the drummer was thirty, and the sampler player, thirty-one. My idea was that guys older than me would know what they were doing. Musically, I was correct. On every other level, I had no idea what I’d stumbled into.
I talked Louise at CB’s into giving us a Monday night residency at the Gallery. There was a club night—clubs were not buildings but branded parties that migrated between venues—called Giant Step in New York. It was a cauldron for the sort of stuff that Pete Rock and CL Smooth and DJ Premier were doing: old jazz records, cut up and played over big beats. They had saxophone players and trumpeters come in and play along with the records. I envisioned a Knitting Factory version of Giant Step, with more strangeness: a tinge of the avant-garde. It would be us and a DJ. I invited some Knitting Factory types to come in and jam along.
It was mostly a bust. We played a decent set, but the Knit guys just lingered for a minute at the bar and then left, confused. While the DJ spun a Beatnuts instrumental, I went to the mic and yelled: SLAW! SLAW! SLAW! SLAW!
(I should’ve called the band Slaw. Soul Coughing is a w
retched band name.)
A guy named Joel, just out of film school, showed up and wanted to do a video. A mere five grand, he said. Yeah, great, but unfortunately I left my wallet in the penthouse. Undeterred, Joel told me that he was going to call up a bunch of major labels; one of them would sign Soul Coughing and pony up the five grand. I listened in amused disbelief.
They showed up.
As I left the stage, a woman came up and introduced herself as being from a record company. Yeah? I sneered. Want to put out my record?
“Yes,” she said.
I went to a luxuriously wood-paneled office on West Fifty-seventh Street, next door to Carnegie Hall. Huge black-and-white photos of the label’s stars, broodingly lit, loomed in the reception area. I met the label’s tanned, British president in an opulent office. We sat on couches made for a pasha. A lavish platter of sushi was brought in—but it was his lunch, he wasn’t planning on sharing it with me. He lectured me, in the tones of a loony, upper-class limey, about how I should fire the band—saying this without having seen the band—use the band’s name as a brand, continue alone. No, no, I said. The band is important, the sound is important.
He was a rich, tan fool. But he was right.
There had been an awkward pause in the show, for the sampler player to load sounds onto the tiny hard drive of his sampler. “You should tell jokes or something there,” he said irritatedly.
I heard that he appeared in Bob Dylan’s Don’t Look Back; he was the bespectacled student whom Dylan goaded, “Why should I get to know you, maaaaan?” The bespectacled possible-future-label president: “Why, because I’m a very good person!”
I went back to the band, agog, and told them.
“Why didn’t you invite us?” they asked.
Slaw became just a weekly Soul Coughing show. I had posters made, with a slogan I meant to emulate The Who’s inspired descriptive phrase “Maximum R&B.” It was “Deep Slacker Jazz.” The manager of the venue, CB’s Gallery—CBGB had annexed the stores flanking it, making one a pizza parlor and the other a gallery/performance space—knew this junkie guy who put up posters for her. I gave him a stack of posters and some cash.
The bass player came in the next week complaining he never saw posters. Fine, I said. Here’s the posters—you put them up. For the next show, there were even fewer posters. The bass player had hired the very same junkie guy, on the same manager’s recommendation.
“I see my posters all over the place!” he said, outraged, when I brought it up.
I divvied up more responsibilities; the sampler player agreed to advance a show. When we got there, there was an art opening; the place was jammed; there was no way to do a sound check.
“I can’t believe this,” said the sampler player, showing a glimpse of the juddering rage under his frightened surface.
Huh? I said. This is your fault!
“My fault?!”
Yeah, I said. That’s what ‘Call them up and ask if everything’s OK for us to show up at 4’ means.
The drummer refused any other duties. “I play the drums, that’s enough, G,” he snorted. But soon, in what I took to be a sign of surprisingly deepening engagement, he started arranging the rental of a supplemental speaker—just one, a big subwoofer, that’s all we could afford—every week. Two sketchy-looking dudes would come in a hatchback, load the thing into the club, and I’d pay them $100.
Eventually I figured out that the drummer had set it up so the only thing in that subwoofer was his kick drum.
People from labels kept coming. We got a lawyer. His assistant called up and left on the answering machine a sprawling guest list of A&R execs, which we ignored. Admission was $4, who could kvetch? The lawyer called up, apoplectic. “These people need to feel important,” he said.
We went, all of us together, to offices and had magnificent lunches. There were certain business-y phrases that every exec at every label used. “At the end of the day,” and “bring to the table.” “It’s about———at the end of the day.” “———is what———brings to the table.” “At the end of the day, it’s———that we bring to the table.”
We went to meet the head of Columbia Records—Jeff Buckley’s cherished Sony—at his office. He looked like a longshoreman in beige Armani.
“GENTLEMEN!” the president of Columbia yelled. “YOU—CAN DO—ANYTHING!—YOU WANT!—ON—COLUMBIA!—RECORDS!” This must’ve been his pitch to artist-y type artists. Even as many of us yearned for corporate love, it was barefacedly uncool to want to be on a major label.
“ISN’T THAT RIGHT, MICKEY!”
“That’s right, Johnny!” smarmed a henchman.
“You look like serious young men!” Johnny yelled. “Look behind you!”
We turned to see a monumental burnished-sterling Columbia logo on the wall.
“COLUMBIA RECORDS!—IS THE BIGGEST!—LABEL!—IN—THE—WORLD! Isn’t that right, Mickey?
“That’s right, Johnny!” Mickey said.
“Now look at this!” Johnny said. “This is the new Sony minidisc player!”
He slammed a minidisc into a desk-side console.
“Look! The title is RIGHT THERE ON THE L.E.D. DISPLAY!”
“Thunder Road” scrolled across the console in digitized yellow letters. Bruce Springsteen blasted at enormous volume. In the din, Johnny beamed, shaking his head up and down like an overstimulated dog.
We played on Halloween. The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion played the main room at CBGB; their show was packed. Ours was nearly empty. An A&R guy from a small label attached to a bigger label, tired and sweaty, wandered in, sat down, and fell in love with me. He was an obese, closeted-gay guy named Stanley Ray.
The tale of the ’90s is sometimes told as the tale of underground bands thrown into the mainstream and showered with integrity-threatening lucre. This is partially true—certainly true in the case of the imperial grunge bands—but in general, artists’ advances were sucked up by recording costs, and the best they could seek was a reliable source of tour support—that is, somebody to pay for the van rental. Real money was made by people who worked at labels.
Labels were selling shitty CDs at insane markups. It was cheaper to manufacture a CD than a vinyl record, but, on a pretense of technological sophistication, CDs cost more than twice as much.
Many contained just one good song. There were CDs by bellicose hardcore bands with one lilting lounge-y sing-along tune, CDs whose song played on the radio was the lone song written and sung by the bass player, funk-metal bands with one incongruous acoustic ballad. The job of an A&R person—it stood for the antiquated description “artists and repertoire”—had transmogrified into mostly just trying to nab bands and sign them, abandoning the repertoire part entirely. Nobody’s job was to say, “Hey, guys, why don’t we take another six months so the bass player can write more tunes like that one.”
The labels stopped selling singles, in the traditional radio-song-plus-a-B-side format; fans, assuming that the rest of the album would be in the same vein of the song they’d heard on the radio, had to shell out for the whole CD. Nobody saw this as a con.
So the labels were drowning in cash.
(The tanking of the labels, en masse, circa the 2000s, messed up my career a little. I might’ve been richer. Maybe substantially so. I still don’t feel sorry for them.)
Alternative music’s popularity meant the labels were trafficking in a genre in which they were almost wholly nonconversant. So they went on a hiring spree. People who worked at fanzines, people who ran “labels” out of apartments and sold only seven-inch vinyl oddities, people who booked bands at dive bars, friends of bands, people who just went out a lot were flying first class—not business class, first class—and being paid executive-magnitude salaries.
Many of them embraced end-of-the-day-bring-to-the-table-ese; others fooled themselves into insouciant contempt for the bosses signing their enormous paychecks. They signed band upon band upon band.
The story of Nirvana—the
band that wrought the cultural sea change—was perceived like this: Nirvana was friends with Sonic Youth, asked them which label was best, and Sonic Youth said, “Our label!” Bands were signed because they might be friends with other bands, or they carried a whiff of prestige that might attract more profitable acts. Some bands were pursued as trophies by the labels, pelted with cash in bidding wars, and shrugged off nonchalantly when their CDs tanked.
Nobody worried. They were tax write-offs for companies with much tax to write off. Plus, who knows what this stuff is, what it means? Any of these bands could fluke into a hit.
A hit! What major labels did, above all else, was seek a hit; a song that gets played on the radio, and then, once MTV was assured by radio of its hit-ness (MTV’s reputation as a tastemaker being altogether undeserved) on cable TV. The fanzine-bred label people didn’t know what hits were, or how to get bands to make them; many of them were unaware that hits were the heart of the enterprise at all. Eventually the bands-that-were-friends-with-bands, the bands-with-artistic-merit—and, alas, that new guard of A&R people, who couldn’t just go play in bars and thus had to find other ways to make a living—discovered that they had wandered into a car dealership and sniffily announced they were shopping for boats.
Corpulent, delicate Stanley Ray used to work in the stockroom at his label but was promoted to A&R when another guy quit. He got the job because he went out to clubs every night, compulsively (if he spent a night at home he’d jabber neurotically about how he must be missing out on something). He was bald on top, with two dirty-blond dreadlocks tied into a ponytail.
He met with us in the revolving restaurant atop the Marriott in Times Square and charmed us comprehensively. He hinted at stories about bands getting fucked by labels, said, “No, I should stop, I can’t tell you that story.” We begged, and with a theatrical sigh, he said, “I shouldn’t tell you this,” then told the sordid tales, with names coyly omitted.
